1,816 words
[M]an has ascribed to all that exists a connection with morality and laid an ethical significance on the world’s back. – Friedrich Nietzsche
Everybody wants to rule the world. — Tears for Fears
After over 40 years of study in the house of philosophy, there are two rooms I have never entered: logic, and moral philosophy. I have glanced inside both but never crossed the threshold and made myself comfortable. One thing I do believe, however: the rooms are entirely separate. There is no connecting door or hallway.
Logic I avoided for the simple reason that I share French mathematician Poincaré’s fearful doubts about mathematics (to which logic seems inextricably bound), that it really only repeats the same uniform concepts, and to no effect other than the ongoing self-fulfilling of mathematics’ prophecy, which is the Pythagorean premise that everything is essentially numerical. That is a tale for another day.
Mutatis mutandis, logic seems to me simply to say the same thing over and over again in an ever more complex way. It is its own point. There is a use for it, if only to sharpen the mind, but it didn’t appeal to me. It just seemed like endlessly playing out a game of solitaire. I apologize in advance to any logicians or students of pure mathematics out there, but I tend to think that with logical propositions, as they say, seen one, seen ‘em all. I am sure Frege is fine beach-reading if you are an Einstein or a Hawking (although I doubt you would have found either of them on a beach, for differing reasons), but I quickly shunned it as you would a party bore. “Supposing truth to be a woman,” Nietzsche writes as the first line of Beyond Good and Evil. Well, if she is, imagine waking up to this:
All S is P.
No S is P.
Some S is P.
Some S is not P.
Hardly riveting pillow-talk, if truth really is a woman.
Mathematics and arithmetic, with their shared logical bedrock, are of course vital to everyday life, and not just for you to check your grocery bill, or to provide the correct measurements a civic engineer (hopefully) used to design the bridge you are about to drive across. Even to cross the road without being struck by a car involves the use of mathematics, expressed (albeit not precisely) both spatially and temporally: this much time, this much space between me and the approaching car, plus approximate speed of both. (Yes, I know you aren’t allowed to “jaywalk” in the United States, but indulge me.) So, in a way, Pythagoras was correct: everything really is number. “The world is all that is the case,” Wittgenstein famously wrote as the first line of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. And it appears it is also math.
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Mathematics beguiled Descartes, and he vowed to use its methodology to support the unshakeable certitude of possibly the most famous statement in philosophy’s history: I think, therefore I am. (St. Augustine actually got there first in City of God, but Descartes got all the credit.) Spinoza in the Ethics attempted to fuse ethics with axioms, and his success can be judged by any reader of what I found to be a bit of a grind, as famous works of philosophy go.
Logic, on the other hand, is not necessary to anyone except the logician, but one thing we can say with reasonable confidence is that morality is not logical, nor does the logical have any connection with our moral experience. The misuse of language is rife today, but the biggest offenders are those who accuse others who disagree with them of not “thinking logically.” Well, that’s because they aren’t doing logic, Dunski. There is not a “logical” answer to the problems of Gaza, or abortion, or mass shootings, or opioid addiction. But these things are not illogical; more alogical.
This is a simple category mistake, and category mistakes do pretty much what they say on the pack. If I inform you that all triangles are green, you can see that, although the sentence obeys grammatical and syntactical rules, it is nonsense on stilts. It’s a category mistake. Similarly, you can’t mix logic and morality.
I always worry that we are the victims of generations raised on Star Trek and its spinoffs. Mr. Spock, the urbane Vulcan of Starship Enterprise fame with the neat way of greeting people was keen on pointing out to Kirk — rather insubordinately, I thought — that certain actions were “illogical, Captain.” But actions cannot be logical or illogical. It isn’t illogical to fling yourself off a clifftop. It’s just fatal.
Logic can be used to parse certain aspects of certain problems, but not to any effect other than the practice of logic. You can break experience down, and make algebraic replacements, but in no way do you have to. Moral decisions involve action, even indirectly. Logic is crystalline and serene in its own context, but once you are involved in the tricky business of life — which we all are — logic is not the tool for the job any more than a hammer can be used to tune a piano. All of the three topics above — and many more — can be termed “moral problems,” and at least we know roughly where we are: in a system of values which are different from the quasi-mathematical values of logic. Your moral beliefs are not available to be stated as incontrovertible theorems.
But try telling that to moralistic people. They believe that their beliefs, actions, and opinions are true in the same way that Newton’s laws of thermodynamics or the certainty of geometrical congruency are true. Look at the Left today, moral logicians all, as certain that a man who says he is a woman actually is a woman as mathematicians are certain that prime numbers can’t be even (with the exception, of course, of 2). Morality is not logical, nor is it mathematical. It is often used, however, with a Cartesian confidence.
Have you ever met anyone who has given up cigarettes or alcohol? They tend to believe they have just cured cancer or solved Fermat’s bloody Theorem. They also seem to assume a sort of moral ascendancy over other mortals — particularly you, if you are unfortunate enough to be cornered by them — because they made a life-choice a child could make; i.e. don’t do things you know are bad for you. Wow. And the moral Oscar goes to . . . They think their great action was logical, mathematical in its precision. Morality seems to have ideas above its station. It thinks it is math but it is — as the great man said — human, all too human.
One of the problems with morality seems to me to be that we all tend to have one ruling maxim, whether we recognize it or not: If everyone lived a little bit more like me, the world would be a better place. Hmm. If everyone lived a little bit more like me, in about three days, when the sirens had ceased for lack of electricity and gunfire had died down because everyone was either dead or out of bullets, you could climb what was left of any reasonably tall building and see plumes of smoke in the near distance in every direction. I have my beliefs about laws, and about how the world should be run, but it is to the benefit of that world that people like me don’t make those laws or run the show. “If I ruled the world,” runs the old song. But thankfully, people like me don’t. And that is because people like me recognize that we can be wrong in our beliefs, moral or otherwise.
In 1650, Oliver Cromwell wrote his famous letter to the Church of Scotland in which he said, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” I could have done without the bowel metaphor, but the point is sound. This reminds me of the COVID-era mantra we heard from our lords and masters — and, increasingly and worryingly, mistresses — that “the science is settled.” Scientists live with doubt. That’s what science revolves around. If it’s settled, it ain’t science, and if it’s science, it ain’t settled. The possibility of doubt in one’s beliefs, and the necessity of recognizing same, was nicely put by Albert Camus, who reportedly wished that there was a political party for people who thought they might be wrong.
It seems that there are only two choices: either there is a fixed and universal moral code, in which case lots of people — indeed, peoples — are getting it wrong, such as not being able to do long division, or there isn’t. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the law of excluded middle. But in that case we are in the realm of Nietzsche and morality as genealogically-formed interpretation, accretional and entirely based on one culture and its history or another. Hamlet was being rather Nietzschean when he told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Hardly a logical basis for morality, or human action in general. Good line, though.
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Simple negation or nihilism won’t do. André Gide’s 1902 novel The Immoralist, which was scandalous at the time, is related by Michel, who attempts to prove by example that to discard any moral values somehow leads logically to satisfaction in life. I have heard junkies make the same argument, a proposition after which they are still junkies. The conflation of the moral with the logical is ruinous in its extreme state. If someone believes that the rightness of his actions is as certain as totting up the internal degrees of a triangle and always getting the same answer, that’s where the trouble starts.
At day’s end, it’s the same old same old: power. Morality pretends to have the imprimatur of logic because those who wish to rule us need to have cast-iron laws, even though what they have is an emotional response made real, with all its absurd pretensions. Morality likes to dress up as logic. That is what the end of 1984 means: Winston does not say he sees five fingers to save his skin; he says it because he really does see them. O’Brien wins, not by using logic but by using power. Soon, people will see transgender women as women not because they face being fired if they don’t, but because they see it. Once you make morality seem like logic, you win. Lions do not have morals, neither do they play chess — or if they do, National Geographic makes no mention of the fact.
Calibration, measurement, equivalence, congruency, and parallelism are concepts that belong in logic, mathematics, and geometry — and only there. There is no place at their table for morality, nor should there be. To paraphrase Kipling, morals are morals and logic is logic, and never the twain shall meet.
18 comments
All morality is tribal morality.
The only real question for moral philosophy is ‘How is morality used by the amoral to control the morally gullible?’
But moralists never want to ask this question because academia is a good gig if you can get it and really rocking the boat is a good way to lose one’s comfy chair.
On a side note: Spinoza was a jew and is to philosophy what George Washington Carver was to science. Which is to say, a complete nullity. Spinoza was included in the canon by self-effacing, self-hating Whites in order to create the illusion of a jewish contribution to real philosophy. Nothing Spinoza said had not be said before.
The late Roger Scruton, whom I dare say was a great deal more learned in philosophy and intellectual history than you, and who wrote the Oxford Very Short Introduction to Spinoza (which was a revision of a previous book; he also discussed Spinoza extensively in his very clearly written Modern Philosophy), had the highest respect for his subject (unlike for those of his book Thinkers of the New Left, for whom he felt only appropriate contempt).
I’m not remotely qualified to pass judgment on so complex and profound a figure as Spinoza, but I think your vulgar dismissal of him because he was a Jew (albeit an excommunicated one) is unworthy of this site, and intellectual nationalism more generally.
The genius of the white man, as is strongly implicit in the work of the late honest liberal historian William McNeill, especially his The Rise of the West, has always been the combination of his Faustian curiosity about the world and his willingness to assimilate and build upon any insights or inventions from other races. We are by far the most open-minded and dispassionate of peoples, and that has been both one of our glories as a race, and a tremendous source of racial power. Discarding this trait in preference for a petty tribalism is beneath us. Just as we can enjoy Chinese cuisine without importing alien immigrants, so too can we investigate and interrogate all of existence without losing our racial and cultural identity. I don’t need to demean or diminish the Other in order to maintain a deserved and proper preference for my own people.
I don’t worship jews or their fake heroes. If you want to grovel to the reputation of Spinoza out of some loyalty to Scruton, go right ahead. Invoking Scruton to defend the inclusion of Spinoza as a ‘major thinker’ makes me think less of Scruton, not more of Spinoza.
What if there is no such thing as ‘Faustian’ anything? What if Spengler is just wrong? Have you considered that? White people’s ‘curiosity’ about other races is a liability, not an asset.
As for ‘demeaning and diminishing the Other’ that’s normal. Your liberal ‘universal values’ and appreciation for the Other is what’s abnormal.
The only reason Spinoza is included as a ‘major thinker’ is because he is a jew. Almost no one took any interest in his work until jews started infiltrating the Academy and promoted him.
The interest of Whites cannot be promoted by espousing a liberal doctrine of ‘equal value’ for all races and cultures to each other.
Spinoza is the Harriet Tubman of philosophy. He’s 90% make-believe and 10% pantheism.
And there is not such than as an ‘excommunicated jew’. A jew is always a jew even when they’re at odds with their local community. Even jews who egregiously betray jews will have their reputations resuscitated if by doing so, the jews can gain some leverage over their racial enemies, the White race. For example, how many jewish capos who openly admit to collaborating with the NSDAP to do harm to jews are allowed to walk freely among their fellow jews and have their ‘testimony’ to the evils of the NSDAP celebrated? It seems like every other jew with an ‘inside scoop’ on the camps is a collaborator. The jews never turn out a jew forever. Spinoza was a jew and remained a jew – and therefore anti-White – for his entire life.
I feel about him the same way the jews feel about Germans who operated concentration camps: He’s the enemy and everything coming from him is suspect and should be treated as toxic.
This extreme paranoia regarding Jews, to lump them all together as bad is just over the top and goofy. Julius Streicher, after the war, was treated badly, allegedly, by gentile white and black jailers/guards. He was sent to another facility where there were Jews as guards and he claimed they were very professional and in no way vindictive toward him. The irony is that they had very good reasons to be, but weren’t. Also your assertion that because Spinoza was a Jew he was therefore anti-white (like all Jews) is just unhinged and ridiculous on it’s face. Spinoza actually criticized the chosen people doctrine of Judaism as ethno-centric and anti-gentile!
What does defending the jews get Whites?
How is defending the jews good for Whites?
I await your answer.
As for lumping all jews together, they do that themselves by identifying as a people and organizing as a people. Why should any non-jew pretend they don’t?
When jews organize against the interests of Whites, its considered ‘their right’.
Pointing out jews organizing against the interests of Whites is ‘anti-Semitism’.
Give up your illusions about ‘fairness’ and ‘balance’ when it comes to jews and you’ll be on the road to improving your loyalty to the White race.
My views aren’t ‘extreme’. If you spend any time looking at the process of the canonization of non-Whites in the Academy and media, you’d understand that the jews have taken it upon themselves to displace Whites – especially White males – from all cultural and historical status except as the enemies of humanity.
If you tolerate jews, you tolerate this process.
There are no jews – who identify as jews – anywhere in the world who advocate for Whites to rule White countries.
There are no jews – who identify as jews – anywhere in the world who have taken their international networks and used them to support Whites who wish to rule themselves in their own territories.
Even the most White-friendly jew does not believe that Whites should have ethnic homelands. Not Unz. Not Cole. Not Stephen Moore. None. They all oppose White Nationalism to some degree or another.
This need to defend the virtue of the jews in the name of ‘some but not all’ is a sickness. Until the ‘let’s not lump all jews together’ fever passes, people like me will have remind people like you how the jews operate.
You defend the virtue of the jew, but that defense is not reciprocated. At this point the evidence of the jews’ process of dispossession of Whites is available to all. Continuing to defend them isn’t ‘ethical’ unless you consider masochism to be an ethical position.
Spinoza’s ‘critique’ of jewish ethnocentrism is irrelevant. He had no power. His presence in the canon of philosophers is the result of jewish manuvering within the academy. If the jews don’t hate him (and they don’t), then they know something about Spinoza’s supposed critique of the jews that you (as a non-jew) do not. Spinoza’s argument with the jews exists because the jew will not give up being a jew, but Spinoza’s argument can be used to get Whites to give up being White. And it has. See how that works?
This is a classic example of how the jews appear to allow themselves to be ‘hurt’ as long as Whites are hurt more.
“All morality is tribal morality.”
OK. But there is much in tribal morality that has to be taken seriously. Taboos must hold. The infants of our tribe cannot be slaughtered, and the horror of putting violent hands to our feeble, elderly parent must reliably restrain the strong.
If someone violates moral taboos like these, punishment must find them. If need be, it must be altruistic, even suicidal punishment. The Furies must find mortal hands willing to do their work, at any cost.
People who think that morality is all about clever, amoral people manipulating suckers won’t get the job done.
Of course ‘tribal morality’ has to be taken seriously. Actually, it’s the only morality to that should be taken seriously. Abstract ‘universal’ morality is a Platonic superstition best laid to rest.
Stop worshipping jews and conservatism.
The jews don’t ‘excommunicate’ other jews. Spinoza was a jew who gets included in the canon in order to make sure there’s a jew in the canon. That’s it.
That Scuton liked Spinoza tells me only that ‘conservatism’ exists to make White politics safe for jews. That’s all it’s accomplished in 300 years.
Your inability to admit that the Other is your enemy does not mean that my willingness to do so is a failing on my part.
Hamman is far more interesting than Spinoza but he wasn’t a groveler to the jews, so he gets little love.
I’m not an Idea Nationalist.
I’m a White Nationalist.
I have found Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory in The Righteous Mind (2012) very illuminating. Atheist liberal Jew though he be.
He recognizes that moralities are intuitive first and rationally explicated later and he unfolds the five or six moral “senses” which constantly appear (or are, as in liberalism, disappeared.) Not only are care and fairness involved in right living, but reverence, loyalty and obedience.
Moral philosophy was never my great interest but I have developed a sense that any foregroundedly universal ethic (like Plato’s) is backgroundedly designed for the survival and flourishing of the particular tribe which produces it. Most universalist moralities (and religions) seem to mesh quite comfortably with the tribal interests of those who profess them. This seems to me to be highly adaptive and unavoidable.
Our feckless age is the exception, where we Whites are supposed to hold rootless and airy universal UN values even (and especially) when they damage our tribal self-interest, even our survival. And therein lies a tale.
Long before I read Haidt, I’d come to the same conclusion. People first do what they’re going to do and then rationalize/justify it afterward. Haidt just lays out more clearly the different kinds of brains that human being have. If we view the White race as a single organism, these different brains are all necessary for human survival. What’s discombobulated the race is the work of Haidt and his co-ethnics to unbalance the relationships between the different White brains.
Unlike laws of nature which constrain what can be done, laws of society prescribe what should not be done. Thus they are inherently normative claims putting them squarely in the realm of morality.
On the other hand, a liberal system of government (supposedly) seeks to do away with arbitrariness in the creation and enforcement of laws. The ideal liberal government would thus be a government by algorithm, one that has been mathematically proven to “be fair” and “respect everyone’s rights”.
So in a liberal society we necessarily arrive at a conflict where normative claims have to be regarded as provable propositions. This can’t be done in an intellectually rigorous way, but most people aren’t intellectually rigorous most of the time. So in practice it is enough to merely “convince” a large enough number of people. Propaganda becomes the continuation of argument by other means.
There is not only what should be done and what should not be done but who should do it and who should not.
I don’t know what could have fixed things for King Oedipus, but it would not have been Platonic philosopher kings calmly lying or concealing the truth about whose child was whose in order to maintain some ideal scheme.
We have very old and very wise intuitions that particular loyalties and taboos based on blood descent count.
The philosophers have often refused to recognize that, but the philosophers are not all-wise.
The Clouds is a good play and Aristophanes had a point.
The use of ‘propaganda’ has existed since before recorded history. It was ‘invented’ by The Shaman to control The Strong Man. The ability to convince others of the need to act is a form of sovereignty expressed by both the Hero and the Sorcerer. All that liberalism has done is erode the sovereignty of the Strong Man (juridical sovereignty) by accentuating the sovereignty of the Sorcerer (spiritual sovereignty). ‘Propaganda’ is not a form of argument, not really. It’s a kind of magic.
“It seems that there are only two choices: either there is a fixed and universal moral code, in which case lots of people — indeed, peoples — are getting it wrong, such as not being able to do long division, or there isn’t. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the law of excluded middle. But in that case we are in the realm of Nietzsche and morality as genealogically-formed interpretation, accretional and entirely based on one culture and its history or another.”
I think that’s not correct. We do not have a binary choice between the suicidally universal abstract morality that gives our race no future, and the radically corrupted hand-me-down “Judeo-Christian” morality that also gives our race no future.
We can think about reality as we know it, including genetic reality, and race and its necessities. We can think new thoughts.
We can be loving curators of our White, Western heritage, keeping or reviving what is good or neutral and leaving out what has been corrupted and is now poisonous.
We can be loving curators of our White, Western heritage, keeping or reviving what is good or neutral and leaving out what has been corrupted and is now poisonous.
I think Whites have to abandon ‘the West’ in order to have a White future. ‘The West’ has become a burden that is slowing Whites down, inhibiting our ability to adapt as a collective organism. Like a hermit crab whose shell has gotten too small but cannot find a larger shell to crawl into.
Fortunately, Whites can create their own cultural ‘shell’.
We don’t need to make any effort to ‘preserve’ anything but our genetic inheritance.
What we need is to create a culture that rewards White racial loyalty and punishes race-mixing.
Every White needs to arrive at a love for the White race as a whole and individually.
it doesn’t matter how they arrive at this love, only that they do.
This is so wrong, on so many levels. It is our precious Western Civ that makes whites so worthy of racial preservation. It is what grants us the moral license to take the hard coercive measures necessary to secure our existence and future. If most whites were either weird progressives or repulsive, Eminem-style ‘wiggers’, who would care about their racial (as opposed to mere individual) survival? Not me. It is precisely because the world’s morally and intellectually best civilization is inextricably tied to white DNA – that whites alone created and alone will sustain that civilization – that assuring white genetic preservation (and its subsidiary requirement of ethnoterritorial security) becomes a moral cause above all others.
We made what was good because it was in our genes to do so. We had the desire and the ability, and we still do.
We ran into a super-race of exterminators, gifted far beyond us in the desire and ability to infiltrate, exploit, defile, and destroy. Now everything we made is polluted.
We have to stop White genocide. We have to survive as a race. If we achieve that we’ll achieve everything. What we made we can make again, clean and beautiful and new.
If most whites were either weird progressives or repulsive, Eminem-style ‘wiggers’, who would care about their racial (as opposed to mere individual) survival?
I would.
Because I’m a White Nationalist not a Western Civilizational Nationalist.
‘Western civilization’ is like a garment Whites created. It shows off our figure nicely but when the house is on fire, you don’t go back for it. You grab the kids, the pets and run.
You can always make another gown.
You can’t unburn your family.
‘Western civilization’ is not my family.
White people are.
Frankly, I think the jews and anti-White Whites are doing us a favor by destroying our past. Pro-White Whites would probably never have the backbone to do so.
But the fact that all our ‘institutions’ have been turned against us or are in the process of being melted down for dildos is just the sort of situation that ought to focus the mind of the race on what really matters,
Which, in my view, is racial solidarity and racial nepotism among Whites.
‘Western civilization’ is not going to save us.
And trying to save it is just slowing us down and keeping us from concentrating our resources on the present and what need to be done: Being one people united against our racial enemies.
We can always remake ‘Western civilization’ or, more likely, create a theme park about it while we get on with creating and evolving a new White culture that transcends all the shitting stuff we’ve done and been through over the last 5,000-plus years.
But in order to be able to do anything that is ‘White’, there need to be White people.
Which is why I’m a White Nationalist.
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